ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the need for smarter infrastructure and overviews general categories of research conducted within the Smart Infrastructure Institute. A key foundational prerequisite for proactive maintenance is to have comprehensive and up-to-date situation awareness and assessment of existing infrastructure systems. The vision for smart infrastructure involves higher quality infrastructure systems, combined with efficient, effective, secure, resilient and sustainable operations. Systems development involves development and deployment of novel sensing and control hardware, as well as corresponding decision-support systems with the idea to collect data from a wide variety of complex civil infrastructure environments such as crowded convention centers, railroad tracks, closed indoor spaces, and difficult-to-access bridges and transmission lines. Proactive decision support and control targets predicting possible future conditions of infrastructure systems, given some state and projected future usage. This will also translate into devising action strategies with the goal of prolonging the lifecycle of the target infrastructure system.
